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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Riccardo Tisci Leaves Givenchy: What It Means

Yet another seismic shift is taking place in French fashion. Riccardo Tisci,
the creative director of Givenchy and the designer responsible for
redefining the brand Audrey Hepburn built for the Kardashian era, said
on Thursday that he was leaving the brand after 12 years. A successor
has not been announced.

Bernard
Arnault, chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the
French conglomerate that owns Givenchy, said in a statement, “The
chapter Riccardo Tisci has written with the House of Givenchy represents
an incredible vision to sustain its continuous success, and I would
like to warmly thank him for his core contribution.”

Designer
moves have become so common of late they are starting to seem more
yawn-inducing than critical. (A brief list of departures, since 2015,
include Raf Simons from Dior, Hedi Slimane from Saint Laurent, Alber Elbaz from Lanvin, Alexander Wang from Balenciaga, Consuelo Castiglioni from Marni and, as of last Monday, Clare Waight Walker from Chloé.) But Mr. Tisci’s amicable divorce from Givenchy, rumors of
which WWD reported on last month, could have deeper repercussions.

Mr.
Tisci had, after all, not only transformed Givenchy into one of LVMH’s
most successful brands, but was often held up as a model for the
partnership between hot young designer and heritage house. That he was
willing to end what appeared to be a happy marriage suggests that the
old days of designers staying in place for decades (Karl Lagerfeld has
been at Chanel since 1983) may be finally, officially, over.

Linda
Fargo, senior vice president for fashion and store presentation at
Bergdorf Goodman, said, “I guess destabilization is the new normal.”

When
Mr. Tisci joined Givenchy in 2005 the brand was floundering after being
led by a quick series of creative directors, including John Galliano,
Alexander McQueen and Julien Macdonald. In an interview
with The Financial Times in 2011, Marco Gobbetti, the former chief
executive of Givenchy, said the brand was “a mess, without an identity.”
And Mr. Tisci was a 30-year-old upstart Italian with a gothic
sensibility who had barely started his own line.

It
seemed a surprising match, but Mr. Tisci managed to combine his own
harder-edged sensibility with a certain French classicism and a dose of
emotion to give Givenchy a newfound relevance: He made crosses, skulls
and the perfect white shirt make sense.

Mr.
Tisci was also an early adopter of social media, cognizant of the power
that those platforms and influencers would have on fashion. He has 1.8
million followers on Instagram, and many of his famous friends appear in his posts as often as they do in the front row of his shows.

LVMH,
which also has brands such as Louis Vuitton, Céline and Fendi in its
portfolio, does not break down the performance of individual maisons in
its financial results. But the number of employees at Givenchy has more
than tripled since Mr. Tisci joined the house in 2005, and sales revenue
is believed to have grown to around 500 million euros ($539 million)
annually. There are now 72 free-standing stores worldwide (compared with
seven in 2005), with a Rome flagship set to open this year, and plans
for a London store are underway for next year. Last week, LVMH, the
world’s biggest luxury group, posted record revenue and profits for 2016, beating expectations because of strong sales in the United States and Europe and a pickup in demand in Asia.

“Riccardo
has accomplished everything a designer can do for a brand, clocking a
very respectable tenure and creating a fully realized language for
them,” Ms. Fargo said.

So, why leave?

Mr.
Tisci said in his statement, “I now wish to focus on my personal
interests and passions.” But rumors have suggested he may be headed to
Versace. It would mean going home to Italy, and to a brand whose
unabashed Italian sex and power-woman aesthetic mirrors his own. And Mr.
Tisci is close to Donatella Versace (he shocked fashion in 2015 when he
featured Ms. Versace, at least nominally a rival designer, in a
Givenchy ad campaign).

Besides,
the suggestion, briefly beloved of the industry, that a designer needs a
timeout from the increasingly endless show seasons, which was posited
when both Mr. Simons and Ms. Waight Keller left their posts,
increasingly seems like smoke and mirrors. After Dior, Mr. Simons took
an even bigger job at Calvin Klein, and Ms. Waight Keller is said to be moving to a different brand (Givenchy?).

Perhaps
this is the answer. Once upon a time, a designer’s name was on the
door, and his or her heart was in building a legacy. Now it is rare that
any creatives start their own line. Rather, the biggest jobs involve
putting their talents at the service of someone else’s already gilded
name. That may be an interesting intellectual and creative challenge for
a while, but once achieved, it no longer holds the same allure, and the
search for the next test begins.

“This
clearly shows that a lot of folks are about change and evolution, and
both designers and brands want to be continually in motion,” said Marc
Metrick, president of Saks Fifth Avenue.

We
tend to romanticize “the designers” and to bestow upon them some sort
of mystical, spiritual connection to the houses where they reign, maybe
because what they make touches our bodies and can thus transform our
lives, maybe because it involves the alchemy of invention or because
designers these days have the golden glow of celebrity. But what Mr.
Tisci’s move suggests — what all of this may reveal — is another, more
parochial, truth: Being a designer is a job like any other. And people
change jobs.

François-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of Kering, suggested when Frida Giannini was ousted from Gucci in
2014 that 10 years was probably long enough for any designer to stay at
a brand, and after that it was good to mix things up (10 years also
being the number most often chosen as an ideal tenure for a chief
executive). At the time, it seemed like a radical idea. It does not any
more.